By any chance, does someone here live in Ann Arbor, MI? If yes, and if you wouldn’t mind picking up an item for me from the University of Michigan this week, please DM me 🙏🏾

- Am I targeting the right customers? - Do I understand how their minds work? - How can I change their minds about my product? You say you spend a lot of time with customers. Why isn’t your product winning then? A video with the core truth of marketing:

The 7 specific powers in the AI era: 1. Exclusive, high quality data 2. Uniquely correct insight (incl. deep customer+market understanding & creativity) 3. Optimal UX 4. Distribution + Bundling 5. Niche business model 6. Regulatory capture & government relations 7. Long runway And yes, these were always important. It’s essential to grasp that it is a matter of degree rather than kind. For example: the stakes for #1, 2, 3, 6 will be dramatically higher than before.

It took me a long time to see why most successful people don’t actually understand what skills, traits, and actions of theirs really made them so successful. This happens because of the Curse of Brilliance: overlooking your natural gifts and inflating what *you* found hard to do.

Took the Improving Your Product Sense course from @shreyas last week and I cannot recommend it enough! It was incredibly pragmatic and tactical. But more important: it made me realize there’s a whole other level to this game. Like when you work for a true great founder or boss. It’s inspiring… while also being a kick in the ass to get better. I took 24 pages of hand written notes (my hand still hurts, haven’t written that much since school 😅)

The great educational reckoning in the age of AI is here. Stanford MBAs are questioning why they spend two years and $300k and emerge with none of the skills that are most relevant in today's workforce. Top schools can no longer coast off their brands.

Clear thinking is our default state but in most people this default has been overridden by the objective of feeling good and sounding clever. The only solution is to absorb the previous sentence until you feel it in your bones. But this solution doesn’t satisfy anyone, and paradoxically, they continue seeking more knowledge while simultaneously claiming they agree 100% with the first sentence.

What, if anything, can one learn or conclude from this observation? (you can assume that the diagram is indeed true for a majority of people)

It gets better and better 🤣